Common brain regions underlying different arithmetic operations as revealed by conjunct fMRI-BOLD activation

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• Mental calculation involves a distributed brain network, with studies reporting inferior parietal and lateral frontal activations.
• Comparing brain activation across studies is challenging due to varied arithmetic operators and presentation modalities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate brain activity using fMRI-BOLD during diverse arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) of varying complexities.
• To identify common and operation-specific brain activation patterns in mental arithmetic.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) BOLD signal acquisition.
• Participants performed calculation tasks involving different arithmetic operations and complexities.
• Analysis contrasted brain activation across different operations and complexity levels.

Main Results:

• A common activation pattern, including right precuneus and bilateral middle/superior frontal regions, was observed for all arithmetic operations.
• Operation-specific activations were found in frontal, parietal, and central regions when contrasting complex and simple calculations.
• Results support the link between mental arithmetic, working memory, numerical knowledge, and finger-based processing networks.

Conclusions:

• Mental arithmetic engages a core network supporting working memory and numerical processing, potentially originating from finger movement networks.
• Examining each arithmetic operation independently is crucial to avoid overgeneralization in mental arithmetic research.
• Findings underscore the importance of considering operation type and task complexity in neuroimaging studies of arithmetic.